Richard Andrews’ ExhibitionsNet.com - The UK Gallery, Museum, Heritage and Visitor Attraction Centre site.lists some cool exhibits on a regular basis.

Here are some choice stops should you find yourself in the UK this winter, you lucky bastard:

  1. Taking Liberties provides a rare opportunity to view actual documents that played key roles in the nation’s struggle for freedoms and rights, charting the roots of British democracy over a period of more than 900 years.  British Library
  2. Soho Archives 1950s & 1960s, featuring images of the bohemian area of London’s West End, “a haven for creativity and criminality, scandal and sexuality, and a source of inspiration for photographers.”  The exhibition features images from three archives: Jean Straker founded the Visual Arts Club in Soho; Magnum photographer David Hurn’s and The Daily Herald. The Photographer’s Gallery.
  3. Footlights: Capturing The Essence Of Performance. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

Although the following shows have come and gone, a girl can still dream about the catalogs that they must have inspired. Here are some choice bits I’d visit if I had a time machine that thrust me back to 2004.

  • Censored At The Seaside: The Censored Postcards Of Donald McGill examines “a bizarre event in the life and work of a man now regarded as a national treasure. On view at the Cartoon Art Trust Museum. For more than fifty years Donald McGill was the pre-eminent exponent of the British saucy seaside postcard. Yet in the 1950s, his postcards became the subject of complaints and he fell foul of the antiquated 1857 Obscene Publications Act.”
  • Li Zhensheng: Red-colour New Soldier presents the only known existing photographic documentation of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China between 1966 and 1976.  The Photographers’ Gallery, London
  • The Foundling Museum has opened on the original site of the Foundling Hospital, Britain’s first orphanage, which was founded in 1739, thanks to the work of the retired shipbuilder and sailor Thomas Coram. In an effort to satisfy the abandoned children’s spiritual, as well as physical needs, Coram enlisted the help of William Hogarth, and other artists of the time, thus creating Britain’s first art gallery.
  • Unlocking The Archives: 500 Years Of Seeing The World is the inaugural show of a £7.1m Lottery funded scheme which has opened one of the world’s largest collections of geographical knowledge to the public for the first time in 174 years. A new study centre at the Royal Geographical Society.
  • Fantasy Architecture 1500 - 2036 brings together imaginative, fantastic and visionary schemes for a better world - some practical, some wholly fanciful. These visions of the future remained on paper due to lack of funds, political change, or because technically they were ahead of their time.
  • Pain: Passion‚ Compassion‚ Sensibility explores the changing cultural place of pain, and the role of science in shaping our beliefs‚ with visual and verbal representations‚ medical attempts to deal with pain‚ examinations of modern and contemporary theories about the nature of pain, and a look into our reactions to the pain of others. The Science Museum.